1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to using crowd-sourced data from vehicles to determine road friction conditions and, more particularly, to a method and apparatus for determining road friction conditions using vehicular participative sensing systems, where road surface friction data from multiple vehicles can be collected on a central server and analyzed to identify friction conditions by roadway and by locale, and advisories of the road friction conditions are communicated to vehicles on the road.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
Many vehicles now include systems which can sense a wide range of parameters related to the vehicle's operating environment. For example, vehicle dynamics sensors can define a vehicle's dynamic state, object detection systems can detect objects and other vehicles on and around a roadway, the status of a vehicle's systems such as braking, steering, ABS and airbags is available, and traffic and road conditions can be determined by a variety of methods. Most of this data is evaluated and used by the host vehicle in real time, and discarded when it becomes stale.
At the same time, telematics systems are also available onboard many modern vehicles, where the telematics systems continuously or regularly communicate data from the vehicle to a centralized database system, which also communicates information back to vehicles. Although these telematics systems have been used to gather some limited types of vehicle data for specific purposes—such as detecting airbag deployment in a vehicle and automatically requesting emergency services—much more data could be collected from a large number of vehicles, and this data could be used to identify a wide range of traffic and road conditions which can be disseminated to and beneficial to other vehicles in a certain geographic locale.